Valve Engineer Fixes Massive Performance Issue For RADV Driver With AMD FSR2

[Danny3]

AMD doesn't owe you anything. And it's not AMD that duplicates the work, but the RADV developers.

I'm not one of those guys who buys stuff and they think they deserve nothing.
I paid for a hardware device that needs to come with software designed for it in order to function properly and that I can use all its functions.
That software must be as optimized as possible and as feature-full as possible.
The hardware is already missing good to have quality of life features like SR-IO virtualization and CEC support to pass remote control commands to the computer from the attached TV.
This don't exist even on Windows, so I guess that they're missing in hardware too.
This makes AMD's GPUs a bad deal to start with.
The fact that AMD's Linux driver is not the most optimized driver and it's missing a lot of driver functions compared to Windows makes it even a worse deal.

In order for Adrenalin to make sense, Linux and the amdgpu driver must be able to perform the functions (under the hood) that Adrenalin provides. Otherwise, it turns out that there is a control panel, but the banal color management (or any other function) works with errors.

Yeah, so?
They did it for Windows, didn't they?
Why do I need to get a much worse support and GPU control just because I refuse to use Windows and I use Linux?
They already wrote from scratch those functions for Windows.
That doesn't meant that they need to do it from scratch for Linux too.
They just need to port and adapt those to Linux, which of course will meant that some code need to be written from scratch, but it's not 100% like it was for Windows.
In the worst case, they can even just open source their Adrenalin Windows driver and I'm sure Valve or the community will port it to Linux and write the missing pieces.
What AMD lacks is the will to give us an experience similar to Windows users.
AMD of course profits from the fact that competition is crap too as Intel refuses to do that either and Nvidia has just a basic control panel without much to do or tweak.

So, I'm not a happy customer and I don't consider I got good value for my money and that influences my actions.
Whic are not buy any new AMD GPU and not recommending them to anyone as I don't help companies that don't respect me.

[varikonniemi]

One team works for AMD, and the other works for Valve. I'm not sure why it would be surprising that there's not much communication between the two, they are completely different companies.

you are correct, i forgot that radv is not amd's effort.

[blackiwid]

Now if they take away things that used to work when you bought the hardware, that's when I think it's valid to complain.

You should always complain, me as German thinks that complaining usually is a net positive, it should just not be some sort of flaming, personal attacks or somewhat constructive and of course their are more legitimate complaining than others.

Because they can't make drivers perfect with perfect speed and features, there will always be priorities, and usual developer will always focus on giving you as much as possible features and speed instead of prioritizing exposing existing features in GUI also they will try to automate activation / deactivation of this features dynamically, because no user interaction with the wished out come is still the gold standard, because if you need user interaction many will not use it even if it would be better to use such features.

About being legitimate to complain about feature regressions, it depends, if they remove some old compatibility thing that 5 users use but it has other benefits to remove it or they just don't want to waste the man power to maintain it and use their time for other things, and or it's nothing important that might be very well justified and sure you can complain but that makes the complain then not more legitimate than asking for new features that would be important.

[smitty3268]

1. There are guarantees. A guarantee that I can contact the graphics card manufacturer directly and get support.

Your argument is basically the equivalent of: "I bought a nvidia graphics card and it's not running on my Haiku machine. I paid for them to make a driver. Why are they so lazy?"

When you buy a gpu, it's on you to do your homework about how well the drivers work and in which environments. Never assume that something which doesn't work now will be added later.

Now if they take away things that used to work when you bought the hardware, that's when I think it's valid to complain.

[Venemo]

Sorry to say, but this article is a misunderstanding. The fix has nothing to do with FSR. This only affects a bottleneck in the FSR2 sample app's renderer, but not the upscaling algorithm itself but rather the part that renders the picture that is being upscaled. It is not going to affect FSR performance in any games.

(Source: I work on RADV and have reviewed the patch in question.)

[Anon'ym']

1. There are guarantees. A guarantee that I can contact the graphics card manufacturer directly and get support.

Can you provide any link or explanation on how this guarantee work?

Did you ever contacted AMD support about problem with their drivers?
Do they fix it?

What should I do with RADV?

I have no idea.

The average user will not engage in this nonsense. He wants to launch the game and play with one button.

Although I can made some meaningful input on the topic of average user concept. I don't think that you will appreciate it.

2. Oh. is that so.. AMD has been praised for so many years, and now it turns out that they have "bad support." Guys, you're not going to please.

I am one person. And you dont need to please me.

Are you talking about a closed driver? Why did you suddenly start praising closed drivers?

I am not praising anithing.
I am comparing product support of two companies.

Of course, you do not need to use a driver from the 3rd party.. Because it doesn't exist!

It does.

As soon as such an open source driver appears and it will be possible to run all games with good performance without problems, then the official Nvidia driver will abruptly become unnecessary and it will be called "bad support".

I am not going to endorse your wild fantasy's.

[skeevy420]

I'm saying that AMD gives you a full-fledged guarantee only for a bunch of Hardware + AMDGPU + AMDVLK.
Everything else is fiction. No "recommendations" will help. The recommendation to use an open stack does not mean that AMD fully supports and cares about it. They certainly do a great job in this direction and even made sure that it was possible to safely switch between AMDVLK and RADV. But to fully support RADV and pour resources into it...? They support Mesa OpenGL because more than ten years ago (as time flies fast..) they made such a decision. Today, circumstances have changed and they only want to support cross-platform AMDVLK.



There is a footnote for this at the bottom: Certain AMD technologies may require third-party enablement or activation. Supported features may vary by operating system. Please confirm with system manufacturer for specific features. No technology or product can be completely secure.

And a disclaimer: https://amdgpu-install.readthedocs.i.../preamble.html

In short, you need to read not only the advertising page, but also carefully study the system requirements. This should have been clarified a long time ago.



Carefully study the system requirements: https://www.amd.com/en/resources/sup...2-INSTALL.html



I can read the system requirements. Therefore, it did not come as a surprise to me.



Are you really that naive? You get to the most common driver download page. No Adrenaline Rush! And then you need to go to the Linux drivers page and carefully study the Release Notes that are included in this package.


Listen, I also want Linux to develop rapidly and AMD to port all its software as quickly as possible. But there are no miracles. Software development is a long process and priorities can change, especially for giants like AMD.

We are now in a position when the AMD goes a little by its own way, and Valve is stomping in place and does not know how to attract developers and players to Linux. To indicate AMD that it should fulfill all the desires of the 2% gamers market is definitely not the right path. You don’t even need to talk about Nvidia ..

It's not just about gamers. It's about anyone buying any AMD graphics card, desktop or workstation, and getting the features that AMD implies the consumer will get where AMD implies the user will get them. It's about AMD fulfilling their end of the consumer deal.

This is the exact quote in the AMD footnotes:

Certain AMD technologies may require third-party enablement or activation. Supported features may vary by operating system. Please confirm with system manufacturer for specific features. No technology or product can be completely secure.

The problem is that, depending on one's perspective, the system manufacturer can be considered to be either AMD or MSI/Asus/Asrock/etc when a person buys a CPU or GPU to put in their self-built system or as an upgrade to their pre-built. AMD doesn't clearly and succinctly specify which of their specific features are the ones that vary. And if someone does add a GPU to their prebuilt, is it really on Dell or System76 to provide support for a GPU they didn't intend on their system to have installed or should it be on AMD?

MSI does specify in their footnotes on their page for my GPU:

• Radeon™ Anti-Lag is compatible with DirectX 9 and DirectX 11 APIs, Windows 7 and 10. Hardware compatibility includes GCN and newer consumer dGPUs Ryzen 2000 and newer APUs, including hybrid and detachable graphics configurations. No mGPU support. GD-157
• Radeon™ Boost is compatible with Windows 7 and 10 in select titles only. Hardware compatibility includes RX 400 and and newer consumer dGPUs, Ryzen 2000 and newer APUs, including hybrid and detachable graphics configurations. No mGPU support. For a list of compatible titles see https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/radeon-boost. GD-158
• AMD FreeSync™ technology requires AMD Radeon™ graphics and a display that supports FreeSync technology as certified by AMD. AMD FreeSync™ Premium technology adds requirements of mandatory low framerate compensation and at least 120 Hz refresh rate at minimum FHD. AMD FreeSync™ Premium Pro technology adds requirements for the display to meet AMD FreeSync Premium Pro compliance tests. See www.amd.com/freesync for complete details. Confirm capability with your system manufacturer before purchase. GD-127

That doesn't cover everything, but what it does cover is more clearly defined than what AMD offers on their site. Adding in some things like that in the footnotes shouldn't be too hard for AMD to do. Over the past 8 years I've suggested to some AMD employees who post here that they should add in some asterisks on these pages so people would be more likely to check the footnotes. Instead, AMD revamped their site in a manner that took away informative footnotes.

[Daktyl198]

Y'all, the valve developer literally stated in his patch that this only affected the FSR2 demo due to a niche set of circumstances. I doubt this will have much impact in the real world. If it does, it means the game developer implementing FSR2 has done so wrongly.

[mbriar]

Do you think the optimization would be likely to be more noticeable outside that demo? Such as in videogames? Just curious

It could affect real games if they are running into the same bottleneck and render lots of vertices with 0 or NaN w component, although I would suspect that it's quite rare. Disclaimer: not a graphics programmer.

[mphuZ]

1. And actually they DONT give any guarantees.

2. And this is actually called bad support. AMD support is SO BAD that you need to use reverse engendered 3rd party drivers.

1. There are guarantees. A guarantee that I can contact the graphics card manufacturer directly and get support. What should I do with RADV? Who should I write to and where if I use this driver? Valve/Google/Github/Mesa...? The average user will not engage in this nonsense. He wants to launch the game and play with one button. And if an error occurs in the driver, he wants to open the AMD Bug Report Tool, fill in several fields and send a report with one button. The situation will not improve until there is something similar on Linux, some kind of agreement between Open Source and OEM.

2. Oh. is that so.. AMD has been praised for so many years, and now it turns out that they have "bad support." Guys, you're not going to please.

Let's talk about Nvidia. Nvidia provides drivers basically for any Linux OS out there that works with any relevant NVIDIA GPU.
So users do not need to use 3rd party drivers at all.

Are you talking about a closed driver? Why did you suddenly start praising closed drivers?

Of course, you do not need to use a driver from the 3rd party.. Because it doesn't exist!

As soon as such an open source driver appears and it will be possible to run all games with good performance without problems, then the official Nvidia driver will abruptly become unnecessary and it will be called "bad support". AMD has already gone this way: if the driver does not enter the Mesa and does not meet all the wishes of Linux users, then they immediately begin to stigmatize the company and belittle the merits of the developers.